


Bad timing, that's all

by destinyofshipwreck



Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: F/M, Lovers to business partners, and back again
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-28
Updated: 2018-08-28
Packaged: 2019-07-03 16:27:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15822654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/destinyofshipwreck/pseuds/destinyofshipwreck
Summary: "We're adults with hotel rooms, you know," he murmurs into her ear. "It's not like we're sneaking off before a press conference or something, we've got all night."With her mouth on his neck, he can't see her rueful wince—a surfeit of time and the absence of sneaking off is exactly the problem, as best as she can diagnose it—but he must've felt her shift against him, because he draws back and looks at her curiously. She's saved by the sound of the door to the stairwell opening a few floors above them and someone's footsteps on the landing."Come on," she hisses urgently, taking his hand to lead him up the stairs. "Mine's closest."





	Bad timing, that's all

In April, on the road for Stars on Ice, in a room at the Delta by the waterfront assigned to Scott that they aren't sharing, he asks her when in August she's leaving for France, and for how long she'll be away.

She has to give him credit for making it casual: he calls the question from the bathroom where he's trying to touch up his shave, voice raised over the rattle and hum of a fan that's inadequate to the steamed-up mirror, while she's sitting cross-legged on the bed, braiding her hair. Not within arm's reach; not cornered.

"Because of the party?" she asks.

"Yeah, and I'd also just like to know," he says, emerging into the bedroom, a bath sheet wrapped around his waist. "You know, when I'll see you after, or if you have time when you're there, to—"

"I'm not leaving until after the long weekend," she interrupts him. "But I can rearrange my flights if we can't get the venue 'til later in the month, you know I wouldn't miss it."

"Long weekend it is," he says.

He's looking at her expectantly, like he's waiting for her to backtrack and address the question she hadn't let him finish.

If it was a question about her willingness to meet him for four or five days in Paris in August, like he's been on the verge of asking since she told him her tentative travel plans when they got home in February—her stomach turns over at the idea that he might think she'd arrange a  _tryst_.

Instead of answering, she unfolds her legs and rises to her feet to cross the room and kisses him, softly, on the jaw, rough with stubble where he'd missed a spot; then, when he moves his hands into her hair and sighs against her, on the mouth.

He's tentative at first to kiss her back, lips unyielding to the tip of her tongue, so she bites him to make him gasp and slides her hands around the back of his neck and draws him toward her, and then his tongue is between her teeth and his hands are wrapped around her waist, turning them both to sit back on the bed, and pulling her into his lap so she can straddle him.

"Tell me what you want from me, Tess," he mumbles into her neck.

"Just this," she says, and slides her hand between their bodies and down the front of his sweatpants, where he's half-hard already.

She starts slow, fingertips circling the tip of his cock, and tightens her fingers around him when he starts to drip into her hand, lengthening her strokes. He's so predictable that it's practically rote by now, how he throbs against her palm and how his hips jerk when he's getting close, and she pushes him into his orgasm with a forceful kiss to swallow his moan, and her free hand buried in his hair. 

He swears when she withdraws her hand and then again when she licks his come off her fingers, and he reaches for her hips to tug her shorts down, but she shifts off him instead, standing up and stepping away and straightening her camisole.

"We gotta go to work," she says, glancing at her watch: quarter past one. "We're already late as is."

"You can't just leave yourself hanging like that," he says, still stretched out where she left him. "It's not equitable."

"Make it up to me later, then," she says with an exaggerated wink, folding his jacket into a compact bundle tucked inside its own hood, which she lobs at his head.

He gives her the broad overview of how he'll make it up to her later in an undertone during the half of warmups they haven't already missed, and then a more specific outline in the harsh fluorescent light of the hall outside the locker rooms between numbers, pivoting discreetly into one or another of their abstruse shared jokes whenever anyone else is in earshot.

Under the flashing lights of their opening position for the tour adaptation of Moulin Rouge, he whispers the details into her ear. Nothing intensifies her focus like a threat to disrupt it, which he has long known about her and leveraged to their advantage. The program feels quick and clean and crisp, like the best it's ever felt.

They can't sneak away before dinner with Javi and Patrick and the rest without running the risk of rudeness: the reservation was made weeks ago.

Over sashimi and skewers of grilled chicken and cold tofu and one more round of sake than she thinks advisable, his hand laid casually on her thigh, he doesn't whisper anything to her at all.

The evening air is cooler than she's dressed for when they peel off from their colleagues to head back early, rather than adjourn to Reflections for celebratory four-dollar doubles. The Delta is a few minutes' brisk walk up the wharf from the restaurant, and the chill of the breeze off the harbour is bracing, but she doesn't shiver until Scott slides his hand under the hem of her jacket to rest on the small of her back.

Inside the hotel, a handful of people are queued next to the elevators.

"Stairs," she says to him under her breath. He nods, and in lockstep their pace quickens past the French doors of the hotel restaurant and the wide reception desk to the stairwell on the opposite end of the lobby.

She's flung herself into his arms to kiss him feverishly before the fire door has even clicked shut behind them, and this time there's nothing tentative about his teeth on her lips and his hands on her ass, half-lifting her onto him, pivoting to press her back against the wall, like they don't have a moment to lose. She reaches between them to fumble with his belt, one leg hitched up around his hip, when he stops her with a hand on her wrist.

"We're adults with hotel rooms, you know," he murmurs into her ear. "It's not like we're sneaking off before a press conference or something, we've got all night."

With her mouth on his throat, he can't see her rueful wince—a surfeit of time and the absence of sneaking off is exactly the problem, as best as she can diagnose it—but he must've felt her shift against him, because he draws back and looks at her curiously. She's saved by the sound of the door to the stairwell opening a few floors above them, and someone's footsteps on the landing.

"Come on," she hisses urgently, taking his hand to lead him up the stairs. "Mine's closest."

They barely make it to her room on the third floor, which she practically drags him into when the elevator dings to herald the arrival of onlookers.

He’s as good as his word: on his knees in front of her he fucks her with his fingers and tongue, her back against the door and her heels still on, dress pushed up around her hips, her hands on the back of his head to steady herself; and he half-carries her trembling to the bed and pulls her into his lap again, her arched back against his chest. He lifts her with one arm around her ribs and slides his cock into her, and holds her there, immobile against him, thighs splayed wide apart, and makes her come again around him with his free hand on her clit, and then again, his teeth leaving bruises on her shoulders and the back of her neck.

She sags off him when he lets go of her, dizzy with orgasm and exhaustion, and only dimly registers when he gets up to shower—his back must be killing him, he had to have slouched against the headboard to hold her that way—and that, instead of joining her in bed afterward, he kisses her forehead, flicks off the bedside lamp, and leaves quietly for his own room, down the hall.

At breakfast the following morning, he seems to have forgotten that the question of Paris was left hanging in the air, and has only lingering sidelong glances for her.

"Completely revolting," says Javi to Scott on his way past their table, arms laden with a tray of croissants.

❧

He texts her one Wednesday at the end of May, when she's in Toronto for a handful of work engagements and he's at home, in the middle of the morning.

By coincidence he catches her at a convenient time, back at her hotel for a quick shower and an outfit refresh before a lunch meeting.

_My lease is up on moving day and I can keep it month to month or let it go. What do you think?_

It occurs to her that he might have looked at her calendar, which is still synced with his out of habit, so there's no use pretending she’s occupied.

Weeks ago some boutique had sent her a sample lingerie set to entice her into a casual endorsement arrangement, which she's neither accepted nor rejected, not having had time to try it on, let alone make any decisions. It's been neatly folded in lavender tissue paper in the front pocket of her weekender ever since, in case of just such an emergency.

She texts him back: a photo of the set, sheer scarlet lace, the creases smoothed out as best she could with her palms, where she's laid it flat on the bedspread, crisp white Egyptian cotton.

 _Oh yeah?_ he responds.

She pulls off her blouse and puts on the bra, an unlined balconette cut more to his taste than hers. It doesn’t quite fit: the centre of the gore is narrower than her sternum and the cups are wider and shallower than her breasts. The outside tips of the underwires dig into her underarms, no matter how she rearranges herself.

Not that he'd notice, she's certain; her nipples are taut from the air conditioning she'd cranked up against the humidity, visible through the lace.

The most flattering configuration of lights in the bathroom is the combination of the lamp from the foyer through the open door and the light in the shower, with the overheads off, she had discovered earlier this morning. Her skin looks softer in the shower light diffused through the glass, the angle of the hall light throwing her collarbones into relief.

After upending her makeup bag onto the vanity, she overdraws her upper lip in pink liner and swipes a pigmented gloss over top; applies a single layer of Diorshow to her lashes; purses her lips to exaggerate her philtrum; slides one hand down the front of her jeans and snaps a cameraphone photo in the mirror with the other; sends it to him with no annotation, and with the makeup still scattered in the foreground.

The subject of the lease renewal is dropped like it had never been broached.

❧

Six weeks later, before another morning of interviews at the end of July, he ambushes her at breakfast, in front of the buffet in the lobby of the hotel they were only in for one night, so they could make their 7am call.

At the crack of dawn, her reflexes are slow. She's sandwiched between him and a chafing dish of unappealing-looking scrambled eggs, a carafe of orange juice at her elbow, a mug of black coffee in one hand, a plate full of limp sausages and fruit in the other.

"I didn't give notice on my Montreal place," he says, his tone light and conversational.

"You still can," she says. "Eggs?"

"Thanks," he says, reaching around her; she's still boxed in. "I don't want to force you into making any commitments, or anything like that, but I'll keep hanging onto it for now, and you can let me know when you want to talk about where our home base is gonna be, and then we can decide."

Her jaw tenses involuntarily as  _home base_  sinks in.

"Can we wait until, you know, we're not—" she gestures with the coffee, spilling some over the rim and onto the cuff of her sweatshirt— "in the middle of so much."

"Sure," he says. "Just, you should know that I'm ready to talk about it."

She sidesteps between his hip and the carafe, perilously near the table's edge, narrowly avoiding knocking it off; maybe she should have, it would have been a good distraction.

"I've never been ready to talk about anything at six in the morning," she says. "Come eat."

"Right, sorry," he says. "Let me get that." He takes the coffee from her hand, dabbing at her sleeve with a napkin.

"No, really, they'll kill us if we're late," she says, edging past him.

The sausages are spongy and sickly pale, hardly browned; the fruit, mostly melon, is grainy; the coffee, bitter. It all tastes like ash in her mouth and sits uneasily in her stomach, even though he doesn’t mention living arrangements or the future for the rest of breakfast, or in the cab to the studio.

His silence is not unfriendly, but it's hard not to imagine that it's more fraught than companionable, and she's never been so relieved to be fussed over by a makeup artist and her hairstylist for the rest of the morning. Scott's whisked away by his own stylist for touch-ups between interview segments and promo photos, and there's hardly time to breathe, let alone have a conversation in private.

By the evening he seems, mercifully, to have lost track of the nebulous future in the flurry of concrete activity before the Ilderton party, and she doesn't remind him.

❧

At the end of August, her flight back from Paris is direct to Toronto, not Montreal. She's planned a week by herself in London to recover from jetlag and get back into the headspace for work before heading back to finalize the choreo and art direction for the tour.

Scott, unexpectedly, texts her to invite himself over on the afternoon of the third day, when she's still a little shy of well-rested but at least caught up on laundry; she didn't even know he was home.

"Can we talk," he says, once he's settled in on the old couch from Crate & Barrel in her living room that she'd brought back with her from Canton. He's holding the coffee she offered him in a blue and cream Polish stoneware mug in front of his chest. Something about his posture is reticent enough that she can't bring herself to sit next to him, opting for the armchair instead.

"About the tour?" she asks.

"No," he says.

Oh, she thinks, here it is: there's no escape this time.

"I wanted to do this before we go back to work," he says. "So we can concentrate, I guess, or so I can."

"What, then," she says.

"You can't just," he starts, and he pauses before continuing, and she can see in his face that he's trying to excise any shred of recrimination from his tone, and for a moment she resents him for coddling her, resents that he's treating her like she's brittle enough to snap.

"No. Okay. It feels to me like you've been avoiding having a conversation with me, and like you're assuming you know how it will go, and like you're holding it against me, even though I haven't said anything to you, because you haven't let me  _talk_  to you, about  _anything_ , in  _months_."

The accusatory edge is back, his best efforts notwithstanding.

“I'm sorry," he adds, looking away. "You're tense, you were tense when I got here. I shouldn't have raised my voice. You go first."

Her teeth are clenched, she realizes. Her tongue is pressed to the roof of her mouth, her shoulders are hunched, her elbows are pressed defensively against her ribs, and her fingers are twisted together in her lap, and it must be obvious. She swallows and feels his gaze draw a line up the tendons in her neck to her jaw, not meeting her eyes.

More obvious still would be to visibly relax all at once, like she hadn't noticed until he mentioned it.

Instead she uncoils herself a fraction at a time, tongue first, then jaw, then shoulders, over a series of slow breaths, not too deep.

"It's, uh, the parameters of our involvement," she says, when she's composed herself enough to look at his face instead of her own hands.

"What about them," he says.

"It's better when they're clear," she says.

"Clear, like, you think we should discuss it? Because, yeah, I think so, too."

Scott looks hopeful for a moment, but his face falls when she doesn’t have an immediate response, and his expression gets more forlorn by the moment, but what is there to say?

"For me, it's like," she ventures, "It was so weird and fraught after Sochi when we were trying to spend time together that wasn't at work, it felt like—"

"Like we didn't have a reason to spend time together anymore," he finishes for her.

"Right," she says. "And then when we moved to Montreal, all we were doing was working, and the rest was so easy."

"You don't need to invent work projects just to spend time with me," he says.

She grimaces; it's not what she meant.

"No, I—I think I'm worried that the work is what made us work, like, if we don't need to be together all the time for other reasons, then—" she trails off, hoping he’ll know how to articulate what she hasn't been able to sort out for herself and finish this sentence, too.

"Oh," is all he says.

Her ears are ringing, she can feel her heart pounding in her throat, and Scott looks like he's about to cry, and she can't bear it.

"Could I sit with you," she asks, and he nods and sets his mug on a coaster on the occasional table next to him, so she does. She wraps an arm around his shoulders and he wraps one around her waist, and with her free hand she reaches to interlock her fingers with his, but he doesn't reach back, and she's left with her hand on her thigh and his, stiffly, at his side.

They've sat together on this couch, not talking, before.

She's fucked him on it, and he's slept on it when they weren't sleeping together but she didn't want him to leave her alone, and they've had shouting matches standing next to it.

It would've been cheaper to sell it on Craigslist and buy another couch in London rather than hire a mover to bring it across the border for her when they left Marina, but the couch was where she'd cried herself to sleep when he didn't believe her that they couldn't trust their team anymore, and the couch was where he had told her that he was sorry for doubting her, and she'd felt like she needed it to anchor whatever her new life would be, without him.

"Tess, I'll still love you no matter what our friendship looks like," he says, finally. "I'm not angry if you want to break this off and just be, you know, colleagues."

"I don't know what we're breaking off," she says.

"I didn't want to pressure you," he says. "I'm sorry."

"I'm sorry, too," she whispers, at a loss for anything else to tell him.

Nothing intensifies her focus like a threat to disrupt it, and with Scott in her pocket for ten hours a day during rehearsals in Montreal and twenty-four on the road, the tour unfolds without a hitch.

❧

In January, a few weeks after their families had gotten together for the holidays like always, she calls him: actually steels herself enough to phone him to talk, in the evening, sitting on the couch in her living room, with three fingers of bourbon in a heavy highball glass close at hand to steady her nerves.

It took the entire afternoon to get her thoughts together, which she did in longhand, with the Montblanc pen he had given her for Christmas half as a joke because she told an interviewer that she loves handwritten notes, in the Rhodia notepad she keeps next to the landline she still has, even though nobody ever calls it except telemarketers and her mother.

It took the entire afternoon and several iterations to make herself articulate the thing that's felt too humiliating to ever say out loud: that she doesn't know how to have a serious relationship of any kind, with anyone, that's not premised around work; that she doesn't know how to handle unstructured time; she's never had to do it before, not in her whole life.

It took the entire afternoon to muster the nerve to practice saying it out loud before she's ready to try it in conversation, but even so, her voice cracks when Scott picks up and she thinks about having to say it to him.

"It's me," she says. "Can we talk?"

"Of course," he says. Somewhere in the background of wherever he is there's a hum of conversation, but it cuts out after a moment, like he's closed a door behind him. "Is it about the tour?"

"No," she says.

"Is everything okay?" he asks.

"I'm good," she says. "I just—I've had some time to think about everything, and I don't, I mean, I'm sorry for how I ended things, and I wanted to go over it with you, if that's okay."

"Like a postmortem?" he says, sounding surprised. "You don't owe me anything, if that's what you're worried about."

"I'm not," she says.

"Okay," he says. "What's up?"

She takes a deep breath, glances at the bourbon, and gives it a try.

"I don't know how to have free time," she says.

"Oh," he says.

"There are a lot of hours in the day and I don't know what to do with them," she says.

"Some of us have hobbies, Tess," he says. She can picture his mock-solemn expression as he imparts this sage wisdom to her perfectly in her mind's eye, and it's enough of a return to normalcy that she's emboldened to plow ahead.

"I miss fucking you," she says.

"Really," he says, after a pause. She can hear a car alarm in the distance on the other end of the line; he must be somewhere public, and outdoors.

"I think I want to try being with you sometimes when we aren't at work, but I, uh, don't know how," she says. "I don't know what to do when we have time, I know how to sneak off with you, but when there's no constraints, it's like, I don't know, like this emotional agoraphobia, or something." She's run out of prepared notepad talking points and is just rambling off-script now. "Scott, I feel like an idiot, please say something."

"Sorry," he says. "I'm just a little, well. Overwhelmed."

"Bad overwhelmed?" she asks. "We can forget it, if—"

"Oh, no," he says. The car alarm is still blaring behind him, echoing up what sounds like an empty street; it's freezing in London, it might be a bit warmer because of the lake if he's in Toronto, but not warmer by much this late in the evening. The rhythm of the alarm draws her attention to her own heartbeat, quicker than its resting rate, and loud in her ears.

"Okay," she says.

"Can I tell you something, too," he says.

"Sure, if it's not about me being stupid," she says.

"No, I want to tell you about when I knew I was a goner for you," he says. "If you don't mind."

"Oh," she says. "Yeah, that sounds good."

"You remember that time at Finlandia when we were blowing off steam before the press conference," he says. Yes, she does.

"And we only had a few minutes, and you dragged me into a supply closet and told me to go down on you, and you must have known that there wasn't time to clean up before we had to go downstairs—" yes, she knew— "and you grabbed my water bottle and took a swig from it right in front of me, and you knew that it was gonna taste like you from my mouth—" yes, she knew that, too— "and you knew that I would lose my fucking mind thinking about you with your own come on your lips for the rest of the fucking press conference, and you did it anyway."

"I did," she says.

"That's when," he says.

"Huh," she says. "I thought it was gonna be something sweet or romantic, or like, I don't even know, but not that. That's filthy, Scott."

"Yeah," he says. "I like the sneaking around and the constraints too, and just because we have more time now doesn't mean we have to luxuriate in it, is my point." His voice is ragged and hoarse and he sounds out of breath, and she realizes that she is, too.

"Where are you, anyway," she asks.

"Outside the Dock Ellis, pretending I needed a smoke," he says.

"Oh God," she says, reaching for her drink at last. "I'm sorry for interrupting, you really didn't need to answer."

"Leafs are up by two after the first and I never listen to Don Cherry anyway," he says. "But please don't try to talk me off in the alley just because you have some kind of sex thing about inopportune situations, I'm not getting frostbite on my dick for you."

Taken aback, she can't suppress the laugh that wrenches itself loose from deep in her abdomen, and her mouthful of bourbon burns clear through her sinuses.

"Jesus," she coughs. "This is pretty wretched, eh."

"Yeah, well," he says. "I was a wreck after Sochi and you gave me a break, and now it's your turn. We're a work in progress."

❧

A few days later she invites him for breakfast, on a Thursday, when she has an appointment at eleven and ballet right before it, but can manage to meet him at the Bag Lady at eight.

"You don't only have to see me when you have somewhere else to be right after," he says when she slides into the booth across from him. "I mean, I don't mind, but your options are open."

"Baby steps," she says. "Speaking of open options, I never sold my condo in Montreal, just rented it out."

"Is that so," he says, and takes her hand to kiss the back of it. "I'm not gonna take that as a promise about anything, just as an I-told-you-so about your investment advice. I've been paying rent on my empty place this whole time like a sentimental chump."

"A chump with no equity and no prospects," she says. "Get it together, Moir."

They're interrupted by the arrival of food, which he'd already ordered for them both before she got there, and this time the ensuing silence is more companionable than it's been since before the Olympics, she's sure.

"I do have something else," she says, after she's paid for breakfast, when they're reassembling their winter layers and getting up to leave. "If we ever move in together, we should have an agreement about it, what it means for our property, before we do. To protect our interests."

"You went and got independent legal advice about living together before you brought it up with me," he says. He's trying to stifle a grin, and not succeeding.

"I only talked to my sister. Well, her friend at Wilson," she protests. "It wasn't formal or anything."

"You drove to Toronto to get independent legal advice from counsel on Bay Street. Very casual."

"Don't read anything into it," she says.

"I would never," he says. "Just need to be sure we wouldn't accidentally be contracting into anything you didn't know about."

"Right," she says.

"Hypothetically," he adds.

"I'll call you after the weekend," she says, and he blows her a kiss as she steps outside.


End file.
